Mr. Speaker, at times like this, I have to resist the urge to laugh out loud when I hear the pompous Liberals talking about things they think are unethical. It is long past the time when Canadians need a lecture on ethics from members of the Liberal Party.
Particularly with this issue, we first heard this question raised by the member for Thornhill and again by the member for Halton and now my good friend and colleague is raising the same question. All I can say is the hypocrisy of the Liberal Party knows no bounds.
When the member for Thornhill first raised this question several months ago in the House, it was then revealed within a day that she herself had been sending out cards to the Jewish community in her riding to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. On the one hand the member for Thornhill was complaining that the government was sending out cards to commemorate special occasions and holidays for various ethnic communities, and the very next day it was discovered that the member was doing exactly the same thing.
Of course this is nothing new. The Liberal Party for years has tried to portray itself as being entitled to do anything and everything because the Liberals felt it was their God-given right to do so. Yet if another party dared do the same thing, dared try to send out commemorative greetings or celebratory greetings to ethnic communities, all of a sudden we are doing something wrong, we are using confidential information.
Mr. Speaker, I can assure you that all of the lists that we obtained are publicly available, as is the same list available to members opposite.
For the Liberal Party to suggest for one moment that we are doing something unethical is quite frankly, more than just a little amusing.
I recall during the halcyon days of the sponsorship scandal, again a subject that the Liberals do not ever want us to talk about, they tried to portray themselves as the victims of the sponsorship scandal. Canadians certainly saw through that. They understood, if not instinctively, they certainly found out empirically during the Justice Gomery investigation that the Liberals were certainly not the victims, but they were the perpetrators of the largest single political scandal in Canadian history.
As a matter of fact, may I remind members opposite and the Canadian public that there are still $40 million that have not been recovered. Justice Gomery could not investigate it because the terms of reference set by the then Liberal government were so narrow and so restrictive that Justice Gomery could not expand his investigation.
He admitted frustration because he knew there were $40 million gone astray. Somehow that money was missing. He might have suspected it was all part of the same sponsorship scandal where the Liberal Party would be able to funnel taxpayers' money back into the Liberal Party's own bank account to fund elections, but Justice Gomery unfortunately was prevented from examining that point any further because of the restrictions put on by the government of the day.
Let me conclude by saying it is clear to Canadians from coast to coast to coast that the highest level of unethical behaviour ever seen in this country was foisted upon the Canadian public by the Liberal government of the late 1990s and early new millennium.